And she named the child I-cha-bod, saying,The glory is departed from Israel:because the ark of God was taken....I. Samuel, iv, 21Of all we loved and honored, naughtSave power remains;A fallen angel's pride of thought,Still strong in chains.All else is gone; from those great eyesThe soul has fled:When faith is lost, when honor dies,The man is dead!Then, pay the reverence of old daysTo his dead fame;Walk backward, with averted gaze,And hide the shame! From Ichabod by John Greenleaf Whittier

Chapter 1

Ichabod

Monday, January 3, 2000. Dr. Edward Fletcher arrived
at the cardiac care area of Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
at 10:35 a.m. His friend Tim Swift, the chief resident on duty,
had called just 20 minutes earlier to ask him to consult on an
unusual near-drowning case.

Ted Fletcher, well into his fifties, had the air of a man
much younger. A gastroenterologist with research grants from
the federal government to study the effects of nutrition on aging,
he held positions on the faculty of Dartmouth Medical School
and staff of Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital. He had come to
Dartmouth right after his divorce nearly twenty years ago, and
now lived alone in an old farmhouse outside Hanover, not more
than a ten minute drive from the DHMC campus in Lebanon.

Brought up in New Hampshire, Ted had gone to Harvard and Harvard
Med, interned at Peter Bent in Boston, done his residency at
Boston City, and then gone to Vietnam, still a subject he rarely
talked about even with close friends. Friendly but necessary,
his parting with Grace had nevertheless been difficult, especially
since she kept custody of their two dear daughters, then in their
early teens but now raising families of their own. Though well-liked
by friends and colleagues, Ted knew that they considered him
a bit eccentric, which he admitted he probably was. And living
alone for so many years in Hanover, still a relatively rural
setting, no doubt had made him more so. He spent most of his
working time on research in an important but little understood
specialty, even within the medical profession. A popular teacher,
he was often sought out by students needing advice but only occasionally
called upon to consult on real patients.

As Ted entered the cardiac care area, Tim spotted him and
came at once to apprise him of the situation.

An unknown white male, apparently 65 to 70 years of age, had
been retrieved unconscious from Occom Pond very early Saturday
morning. The EMT's, finding no pulse, administered CPR and reestablished
both pulse and respiration before arrival at the ER. Little water
had been aspirated into the lungs, but the patient was mildly
hypothermic and appeared to have been in the water for some time.
After warming, his temperature had remained near normal with
no evidence of significant fever. Oxygen was administered by
nasal cannula for 24 hours and then withdrawn, all blood gases
being normal. The EEG showed normal brain wave patterns for deep
sleep. There were no signs of cerebral edema. The EKG did not
reveal any significant ischemia. Apart from continued coma, the
principal problem was cardiac dysrhythmias, apparently caused
by severe hypokalemia that was not responding to adjustments
in the intake rate of IV fluid, which contained potassium, but
overresponding to larger IV boluses of potassium.

Tim added that he had consulted with Tom Bright, the senior
staff cardiologist. Potentially life-threatening, electrolyte
imbalances of this sort are rare in near-drowning cases, and
almost unheard of except when large amounts of water have been
aspirated into the lungs. Tom agreed that the erratic potassium
values were the probable cause of the disrhythmias, but like
Tim had been unable to stabilize the potassium by adjusting the
IV delivery of this cation. They both were baffled by the lack
of appropriate response to this standard treatment. "So,"
Tim concluded, "in desperation, we decided to call in the
mad nutritionist."

"Well," said Ted, "I can see you guys are out
of your league on this one. Let's take a look at the patient
and the chart." Tim led the way to the central desk, retrieved
the chart, and handed it to Ted. They headed towards the patient's
bay.

"No. But there is one odd thing. The man's clothes. They
looked like something out of the last century. Maybe he's an
actor. Has the looks, certainly. He's quite a specimen. The police
are checking, but so far nothing, at least that we've heard.
You know," Tim added, "this is part of the problem.
Especially not knowing who he is, or whether he can pay, there
will be pressure to move him to custodial care sooner rather
than later. So we'd like to get these dysrhythmias under better
control as quickly as possible."

"Well," said Ted, "this is a little out of
my field, but the prognosis isn't that great, is it? I mean,
the coma, lasting this long, is a bad sign. The literature is
full of cases where kids survive long-term immersion in a hypothermic
state, but I don't think there are many examples of the same
thing with adults, never mind senior citizens."

"Not bad for a nutritionist," cracked Tim as they
reached the privacy curtain around the patient's bed. He pulled
back the curtain.

Nothing in Vietnam, nothing in his medical experience, had
prepared Dr. Edward Fletcher for the sight before him. He stood
motionless, transfixed really, just staring at the patient: the
massive head and brows, eyes closed; the mastiff mouth and prominent,
well-formed nose; the high, domed forehead framed by graying
but still dark hair, long at the sides; the craggy face, strong
jaw and dark complexion. In a barely audible, tremulous voice
Ted murmured to himself: "New England's stateliest type
of man...whom no one met, at first, but took a second awed and
wondering look."

Regaining his composure, or at least hoping that it appeared
so to Tim, Ted moved closer to examine the patient. Noting the
large barrel chest and obvious paunch, he lifted each eyelid.
The black eyes glared reproachfully at his penlight, as if angry
at the intrusion. Feeling a bit foolish, but now unable to contain
his curiosity, Ted took out a tape and measured the circumference
of the head: almost 25 inches. Surprisingly, Tim did not ask
the reason for this measurement, much to Ted's relief. What could
he say? The patient was a dead ringer for Daniel Webster? The
great statesman had gone to his grave nearly a century and a
half ago. "Christ," Ted thought, smiling to himself,
"anyone's electrolytes would be screwed up if he hadn't
eaten for 150 years."

"Make me a copy of the chart," said Ted. "I
want to think about this one, maybe even open a book or two.
I'll get back to you as quick as I can."

Walking back to his office, Ted could think of nothing but
the picture of Daniel Webster that his grandfather had given
him. He could remember that Sunday dinner like it was yesterday.
Not more than nine or ten, he had spent the morning memorizing
John Greenleaf Whittier's famous poem "Ichabod" for
school the next day. His grandfather had come to dinner, like
he usually did on Sundays, and Ted's mother had made him recite
the poem for Gramps. The old man had stood and applauded. Then,
seating himself, he started to recount how his father had fought
in the Civil War and been wounded at Gettysburg, and how he revered
Daniel Webster as the greatest American ever, greater than Washington
or Lincoln.

"Dad always said that Robert E. Lee was a good general
and a fine man, but if he'd stood up to his friends in Virginia
the way Daniel Webster did to the abolitionists in Massachusetts,
there might never have been a war. And if Lee had commanded the
Union Army like Mr. Lincoln wanted, the war would have been a
short one." Gramps had paused. Ted had thought he was done
speaking. There was silence at the table, a rare event with his
younger brother and sister. But his grandfather wasn't finished.
"General Lee, you see, was a Virginian first and an American
second. Daniel Webster was an American, first, always, and to
the death." Then, looking at Ted, he said, "That poem
you've learned is a good one, but it's wrong." Ted, expecting
some further explanation, had been surprised and a little disappointed
when, turning to his sister, Gramps had asked, "And what
bad things did you do this morning?"

The next day his grandfather had brought to the house a framed
picture of Daniel Webster and left it for Ted, who was at school.
The picture, a fine print from a daguerreotype of Webster near
the end of his career, hung on Ted's bedroom wall until he finished
high school. Now it hung on the wall of his study at home.

A week after the "Ichabod" assignment, Ted's teacher
had required the class to memorize Whittier's sequel, "The
Lost Occasion." It was lines from this poem, remembered
all these years, that had sprung to Ted's mind at first sight
of the patient. The God-like Daniel and Black Dan, two images
at war, a battle that couldn't be resolved in Webster's lifetime
and probably never would be.

Ted took out a piece of paper to make some notes while he
studied the patient's medical record. At the top he wrote a single
word: "Ichabod."

An hour later, Ted was as baffled as Tim and Tom. Nothing
in the medical record, nothing in the books Ted consulted, explained
the strange behavior of Ichabod's potassium. What is more, the
man seemed in unusually good shape for a near-drowning victim
still in a coma. His pupillary reflexes and ocular movements
were normal. Spontaneous respiration had been restored quickly,
and except for coma, there were no other signs or symptoms of
significant neurologic damage. "The case just doesn't make
any sense," Ted thought. "An impossible riddle. Unless,
unless the man in that bed really is Daniel Webster come back
to earth. And then, well then the new millennium is off to quite
a start"

Ted reached for telephone. "Tim, Ted here. Look, I can't
find anything to explain your John Doe's hypokalemia. I would
have delivered his additional potassium the same as you and Tom.
But maybe we need to stand back. When I don't know what to do,
I usually find it's best to do nothing. Doing no harm is better
than what we're doing now. So I suggest normal saline, no potassium,
and let's follow his electrolytes."

"Good idea. I was thinking sort of the same thing. I'll
keep you informed. Thanks, Ted."

"Okay," Tim laughed. "Spooked ya, did they,
those big black eyes, the way they almost seem to glow. Bye,
bye."

"Yes," thought Ted, listening to the now dead line
and remembering Thomas Carlyle's description of Webster's eyes
as "dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown."

That afternoon Ted Fletcher left DHMC sooner than he had planned.
On his way home he stopped at the Dartmouth Bookstore, where
he bought two books: Daniel Webster - "The Completest
Man" and Lincoln at Gettysburg.(1) These, together with some earlier works
on Webster in his study, would provide a long but pleasant evening
of reading, a nice change from the medical literature that he
struggled so to keep up with.

* * * * *

Daniel Webster passed away at his farm in Marshfield, Massachusetts,
on October 24, 1852, in his seventy-first year. At the time he
was Secretary of State, having resigned from the Senate in July
1850 to serve in that post for a second time. Not since the death
of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth
anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and not until
the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, were the American
people as moved by the death of a public figure.

Indeed, the death of the two great architects of America's
independence was remembered almost as much for Webster's address
at Faneuil Hall in their memory as for the event itself, providential
as it seemed. Generations of American school children learned
the words Daniel Webster put in the mouth of John Adams defending
the Declaration of Independence at the Revolutionary Congress
as if they were Adams' own. The address on Adams and Jefferson,
together with earlier addresses at Plymouth on the bicentennial
of the landing of the Pilgrims and Bunker Hill at the laying
of the cornerstone for the monument on the fiftieth anniversary
of the battle, established Webster's reputation as the leading
orator of his day even before he entered the Senate.

George Ticknor, a sophisticated young Harvard professor, heard
Webster's oration at Plymouth. He wrote: "I was never so
excited by public speaking before in my life. ... When I came
out, I was almost afraid to stand beside him. It seemed to me
he was like the mount that might not be touched and that burned
with fire." John Adams was not at Plymouth that day. Like
most Americans, he read the published version released almost
a year later, and spoke for many when he said that the address
should be read "every year forever and ever."

By the time of Lincoln's death, Webster's prophesy, made on
the Senate floor in his last grand performance on the seventh
of March, 1850, had proved all too true. "Secession! Peaceable
secession!" he had thundered, "Sir, your eyes and mine
are never destined to see that miracle. ... [D]isruption of the
Union... must produce war, and such a war as I will not describe,
in its twofold character."

A century later John F. Kennedy wrote that on that day Daniel
Webster: "abandoned his previous opposition to slavery in
the territories, abandoned his constituents' abhorrence of the
Fugitive Slave Law,...and abandoned his last chance for the goal
that had eluded him for over twenty years -- the Presidency."(2) Years before he had promised the Senate
that no man would ever charge him with an "inconsistency
between [his] conviction and his vote, between his conscience
and his conduct." And so, believing that Henry Clay's proposed
compromise measures, including an effective fugitive slave law,
were necessary to save the Constitution and the Union, Daniel
Webster, to use Kennedy's words, "preferred to risk his
career and his reputation rather than risk the Union." With
Webster's support, the Compromise of 1850 passed into law. The
ugly spectre of secession retreated for another ten years, giving
the northern states time to amass the industrial strength that
all but assured their victory when the war came.

But the abolitionists and free soilers in the north never
forgave Daniel Webster for what his successor in the Senate,
Charles Sumner, labeled: "Mr. Webster's elaborate treason."
No politician ever endured more severe criticism from more eloquent
constituents. Whittier, Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace
Mann, William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell denounced
him. Webster's all too human flaws and shortcomings were manifest.
Now they were embellished and exaggerated in the seamiest tales
about Black Dan. Theodore Parker continued the attack from his
pulpit even as Webster was laid to rest in Marshfield. "I
know of no deed in American history," he cried, "done
by a son of New England to which I can compare this, but the
act of Benedict Arnold."

No one, however, could deny Daniel Webster's heroic aura and
personal charisma. The man made an indelible impression on all
who saw him. Even Parker conceded that not since Charlemagne
had there been "such a grand figure in Christendom."
A contemporary called Webster a living lie, "because no
man on earth could be so great as he looked." Emerson shunned
the great funeral in Marshfield. But walking on the beach in
Plymouth, he wrote in his journal: "The sea, the rocks,
the woods, gave no sign that America and the world has lost the
completest man. Nature had not in our days, or not since Napoleon,
cut out such a masterpiece."

This passage, of course, was the source of the title for the
first book Ted had picked up at the bookstore. One of the few
recent books on Webster, this volume is a collection of essays
and documents published to celebrate the completion of publication
of The Papers of Daniel Webster.(3)
The four essays chronicle his career as politician, orator and
writer, lawyer, and diplomat; and each essay is supplemented
with selected documents. The book also contains a foreword by
William H. Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, who
points out that Webster "...argued 170 cases before the
Supreme Court over a span of thirty-eight years, an amazing achievement
and a record never surpassed." Although he won not quite
half of these cases, his victories included some of the Court's
most famous decisions, such as: Gibbons v. Ogden, 22
U.S. (9 Wheat.) 1 (1824), the New York steamboat case, containing
Chief Justice Marshall's expansive view of the federal government's
power over interstate commerce; and McCulloch v. Maryland,
17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316 (1819), the bank case, in which Marshall,
while upholding the power of Congress to charter a national bank,
gave broad scope to its implied powers under the Constitution.

But in Hanover, New Hampshire, these are pale triumphs indeed
beside Daniel Webster's defense of his alma mater in the Dartmouth
College Case, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518 (1819). By his will,
Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth's founder who died in 1779, passed
the presidency of the college to his son, John. In 1815 the predominantly
Federalist board of trustees, appointed under the provisions
of the college's 1769 charter from the colonial governor, became
involved in a dispute with John that led to his ouster, and he
appealed to the state's Republican politicians for help. At first
opportunity they passed laws packing the board with Republicans
and changing the college into a university subject to supervision
by the state. The old trustees contested the validity of the
new laws in the state courts, where they lost.

On appeal to the Supreme Court, the principal question was
whether the state had impaired the obligation of a contract,
i.e., the college's 1769 charter, in violation of the contract
clause of the Constitution. The case was argued before the Supreme
Court in March 1818, with Webster and Joseph Hopkinson of Philadelphia
presenting the argument for the college. When the Court convened
in February 1819, Chief Justice Marshall delivered his opinion,
holding that the new state laws violated the contract clause
and were therefore invalid. Although subsequent decisions substantially
limited the broad protection of contracts announced by Marshall,
most historians agree that the decision played an important role
in the early growth and prosperity of the American republic.

Today the case is remembered most for the eloquent and emotional
plea that Webster added to his prepared peroration but omitted
from the subsequently published text of his argument. Rufus Choate,
in his eulogy of Webster delivered at Dartmouth College in 1853,
first revealed to the world at large this dramatic event, as
related to him by Chauncey A. Goodrich, professor of oratory
at Yale, who was there. According to legend, Webster had apparently
finished his argument. He stood silently before the Court for
some moments, all eyes turned toward him. Then, addressing the
Chief Justice, he began:(4)

This, Sir, is my case! It is the case not merely of that humble
institution, it is the case of every college in our Land! It
is more! It is the case of every eleemosynary institution throughout
our country -- .... It is more! It is, in some sense, the case
of every man among us who has property of which he may be stripped,
for the question is simply this: "Shall our State Legislatures
be allowed to take that which is not their own, to turn it from
its original use, and apply it to such ends and purposes as they
in their discretion shall see fit!"

Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak,
it is in your hands! I know it is one of the lesser lights in
the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out! But
if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish,
one after another, all those great lights of science which for
more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land!
It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are
those who love it!

Here, according to Goodrich, Webster broke down. "His
lips quivered; his firm cheeks trembled with emotion; his eyes
were filled with tears; his voice choked; and he seemed struggling
to the utmost, simply to gain that mastery over himself which
might save him from an unmanly burst of feeling." Then,
in a "few broken words of tenderness," he spoke of
his love for Dartmouth and the difficulties of his early life.
The Chief Justice's eyes, reported Goodrich, were "suffused
with tears," and Justice Washington, at his side, wore "an
eager, troubled look." Then, recovering "his composure
and fixing his keen eye on the Chief Justice," Webster,
"in that deep tone with which he sometimes thrilled the
heart of an audience," exclaimed:

Sir, I know not how others may feel [glancing at the opponents
of the college before him], but for myself, when I see my Alma
Mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate house, by those who
are reiterating stab upon stab, I would not for this right hand
have her say to me, "Et tu quoque, mi fili!"

Daniel Webster made his greatest constitutional argument not
in the Supreme Court but on the floor of the Senate in January
1830. In a debate on a resolution concerning public lands, Senator
Robert Y. Hayne of South Carolina had presented with ability
and force the doctrine of nullification developed by John C.
Calhoun, then as Vice President presiding over the Senate. Calhoun's
theory rested on the notion that the United States under the
Constitution consisted of a compact of sovereign states, each
retaining for itself the right to determine whether acts of the
federal government were constitutional. Webster believed otherwise.
He traced the constitutional union of the American people from
before the Declaration of Independence, and he viewed the Constitution
as the creation of one people, not of the individual states.

"It is, Sir, the people's Constitution," said Daniel
Webster in his Second Reply to Hayne, "the people's government;
made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the
people." He continued:

The people, then, Sir, erected this government. They gave
it a Constitution, and in that Constitution they have enumerated
the powers which they bestow on it. They have made it a limited
government. They have defined its authority. They have restrained
it to the exercise of such powers as are granted; and all others,
they declare, are reserved to the States or the people. But,
Sir, they have not stopped here. If they had, they would have
accomplished but half their work. No definition can be so clear,
as to avoid possibility of doubt; no limitation so precise, as
to exclude all uncertainty. Who, then, shall construe this grant
of the people? Who shall interpret their will, where it may be
supposed they have left it doubtful? ...

But, Sir, the people have wisely provided, in the Constitution
itself, a proper, suitable mode and tribunal for settling questions
of constitutional law. ... How has it accomplished this great
and essential end? By declaring, Sir, that "the Constitution,
and the laws of the United States made in pursuance thereof,
shall be the supreme law of the land, any thing in the constitution
or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."

This, Sir, was the first great step. ... But who shall decide
this question of interference? To whom lies the last appeal?
This, Sir, the Constitution itself decides also, by declaring,
"that the judicial power shall extend to all cases arising
under the Constitution and laws of the United States." These
two provisions cover the whole ground. They are, in truth, the
keystone of the arch! With these it is a Constitution; without
them it is a Confederacy.

The second book that Ted had purchased at the bookstore, Lincoln
at Gettysburg, examines what is surely the most famous of all
American speeches. But Abraham Lincoln built on the constitutional
foundation laid by Daniel Webster in his Second Reply to Hayne.(5) Lincoln considered it "the greatest
American speech," notes author Garry Wills, "and he
consulted it in composing his House Divided Speech and the First
Inaugural. Echoes of it can be found in other Lincoln speeches,
including the Gettysburg Address." Wills adds, "It
would be hard to find any other text, except the Declaration
of Independence, which Lincoln used with such familiarity and
respect."

So far as is known, Daniel Webster and Abraham Lincoln met
only once, in 1837 when Webster on a trip through the west visited
Springfield, Illinois, just recently chosen as the state capital
due in part to the efforts of Lincoln, then a Whig leader in
the Illinois House.(6) Like most Americans,
Lincoln knew Webster by reading his speeches, not hearing them.
The published versions were carefully edited by Webster, and
often longer and more elaborate than the spoken. At least a hundred
thousand copies of the published version of the Second Reply
to Hayne were distributed, with special emphasis on the west
where its distribution was subsidized by Abbott Lawrence, a wealthy
Boston merchant and friend of Webster.(7)

On the seventh of March, 1850, Daniel Webster opened with
words that became immortal the moment they were uttered: "Mr.
President, -- I wish to speak today, not as a Massachusetts man,
nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the
Senate of the United States." That day Webster did not just
buy time for the Union to gain in relative strength against the
future Confederacy. He stood, as he always had, foursquare for
the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution.

All the hullabaloo caused by the Seventh of March Speech,
which Webster himself entitled The Constitution and the Union,
proceeded from a single point: his insistence that in America
there is no higher law than the Constitution, and that all parts
of the Constitution -- even a part as offensive as the fugitive
slave clause(8) -- must be observed and
defended until lawfully amended as the Constitution provides.
These were the words that enraged many of his constituents:

Every member of every Northern Legislature is bound by oath,
like every other officer in the country, to support the Constitution
of the United States; and the article of the Constitution which
says to these States that they shall deliver up fugitives from
service is as binding in honor and conscience as any other article.
No man fulfils his duty in any Legislature who sets himself to
find excuses, evasions, escapes from this Constitutional obligation.

Although Daniel Webster never achieved the Presidency, from
the Second Reply to Hayne in 1830 to his death in 1852, "he
was," in the words of Stephen Vincent Benet's famous short
story, "the biggest man in the country."(9)
In 1900, when 97 electors cast ballots for the Hall of Fame about
to be opened in New York, Washington received 97 votes, Lincoln
and Webster tied for second with 96 votes each, Franklin received
94 and Jefferson 91.(10) The following year,
in what must be the only honor of its kind ever bestowed by an
American college or university, Dartmouth celebrated the one
hundredth anniversary of Webster's graduation.(11)
For half a century after his death, Webster was by far the most
quoted person in Congressional debates. In 1859, as the nation
careened toward crisis and possible civil war, Rufus Choate must
have given voice to the sentiments of many when, at a Boston
dinner in observance of Webster's birthday, he mourned his lost
leader and cried: "Oh, for an hour of Webster now!"

* * * * *

Tuesday, January 4, 2000. On his way to lunch, Ted
passed by the cardiac care area to check on Ichabod. Tim wasn't
there, but the chief nurse advised Ted that the unknown patient's
dysrhytmias seemed to be improving. She also said that the police
had failed to come up with anything on his identity. Even a complete
check on his fingerprints had drawn a total blank.

That evening Ted resumed his reading on Daniel Webster. The
previous evening Ted had concentrated on the public man, the
historic figure. Now he focused more on Webster's private life,
which held more tragedy that most men are asked to bear.

Webster's first wife, the former Grace Fletcher, died in 1828
after twenty years of marriage. Of their five children, four
died during Webster's lifetime. Two, Grace, their first child,
and Charles, their last, died young. Of the three who lived to
adulthood, Edward, the second son, died of typhoid in January
1848 while serving as a captain with the First Massachusetts
Volunteers during the Mexican War. Three months later Julia died
at age 30 from tuberculosis. She had married Samuel A. Appleton.
They had five children, four of whom were living at the time
of Webster's death, and three of whom later married and had children.

Only Webster's oldest son, Fletcher, survived him. After the
change in administration in March 1861, Fletcher lost his position
as Surveyor of the Port of Boston. He then issued a call for
volunteers and recruited the Twelfth Massachusetts Infantry,
of which he was made colonel. He fell leading his men at the
Second Battle of Bull Run on August 30, 1862, and little more
than a week later was laid to rest beside his father in the family
plot in Marshfield.

Fletcher's older son, Daniel Fletcher Webster, also served
in the Union Army and was wounded. He died of tuberculosis in
1865, as did Fletcher's younger son, Ashburton, fourteen years
later. Thus within twenty-eight years after Daniel Webster's
death, there were no male descendants to carry on the dynasty
of which he had dreamed.

Nor did his beloved properties, the farm in Marshfield and
The Elms, his old family home in Salisbury, New Hampshire, fare
any better. Circumstances, including debts inherited from his
father, compelled Fletcher Webster to sell much of the Marshfield
land. In 1870, fire destroyed the huge barn, and in 1878 the
same fate befell the great Marshfield house and all the outbuildings
except the shed which had been Webster's law office. Fletcher's
widow finally sold what was left of the estate in 1884, two years
before her death. The Elms, too, fell victim to the family's
financial difficulties. Sold in 1871, it became the New Hampshire
Orphans' Home for more than half a century, fell into disuse,
and later was purchased by the Sisters of the Holy Cross, its
current owners.

Poignant as they were, these sorrows were overshadowed in
Ted's mind by a sense of foreboding. Maybe it was the coincidence
of family names, or his younger brother's death in Vietnam, or
perhaps the lack of a male heir. But somehow he felt certain
that Ichabod would prove no ordinary patient.

5. G. Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg,
supra, pp. 123-132. See W. L. Phelps, Some Makers
of American Literature (Marshall Jones, 1923), p. 85.
("Lincoln was the heir of Webster. He regarded the Union
and the Constitution with his predecessor's eyes. Moderation,
fundamental in both men, was then regarded as indecision and time-serving.
Now we recognize it as the purest wisdom. What then seemed faltering
we now know to have been firmness.")

6. II C. M. Fuess, Daniel Webster
(Little, Brown, 1930), p. 64.

7. M. D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate,
supra, p. 179. A reporter trained in shorthand was in
the gallery and took down the Second Reply to Hayne,
which thus got reported almost verbatim in the press before the
published version came out.

8. U.S. Const., Art. IV, s. 2, cl. 3, repealed
by the amendments adopted after the Civil War, provided: "No
person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof,
escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation
therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be
delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor
may be due."